Posts by saul

In 2015 I wrote a quick introduction to CA for people who study the psychology of interaction and discourse (still in press). I’ve used that as the basis of this longish post for people who need some starting points in #EM/CA. Also check the EMCA wiki for new references (there are more all the time – it’s a flourishing field).

Conversation Analysis (CA) is an interdisciplinary, inductive approach to studying talk and interaction ‘in the wild’ and in situations where the formal parameters, theories and models for interaction are unknown, premature, or where theories are currently undergoing revision.

Conversation Analysis (CA) is a method of gathering data involving naturalistic conversational interaction, analysing it systematically, and reporting on features of its structural organisation. CA is distinctive because it is not only a method for analysis, it also constitutes an active sub-discipline within many research areas that involve the empirical study of human interaction. CA has its own standards of evidence, some unusual collaborative research practices, and a rich literature spanning sociology, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and communications. The outline of CA provided here should be used as a guide to contextualise the kinds of claims, arguments, and evidence readers may encounter in the CA literature. Because CA has not developed from a ‘home discipline’ as such, it is widely dispersed and consequently likely that any researcher interested in spoken discourse will find a wealth of CA research within their area of specialism. The intention here is to encourage researchers to draw on core CA findings in their work, to find the CA research and researchers in their own field, and to learn to work with interaction data using these methods

So what is CA useful for? What kinds of questions can one ask with it? And what kinds of answers can be gleaned at different points in the research cycle? CA is especially useful for empirical research on interaction in naturalistic settings where established theories may be lacking or under revision. This is because CA looks for detailed qualitative evidence of how participants work to organise their interactions sequentially in each specific situation. CA relies on a recorded event, utterance or gesture as analytic evidence only when the participants demonstrably use that event to organise their subsequent actions. On the one hand, this forces analysts to limit the generality of the questions they can ask and the claims they can make. For example, studies of interaction in doctor’s offices, courtrooms, or at dinner parties tend to ask questions about how a specific action or utterance is produced in a particular social situation by specific participants. On the other hand, CA’s evidential constraints have led to a methodologically coherent field. By focusing analysis on the methods and events demonstrably used by participants to make sense of their own interactions, CA studies tend to be readily comparable with one another. Although individual studies are situationally specific, analysts can develop and test general findings cumulatively working in diverse settings and fields. Over the last 40 years the most robust and broadly tested finding on which much latter CA research has been based is the turn-taking system described by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974). Without the extended discussion these warrant, the rules of the turn-taking system can be summarised briefly to explain what kind of answers CA can offer.

For any turn at talk, at the first possible completion,

current speaker may select next,

next speaker may self-select,

current speaker may continue.

If 1c occurs, the rules are re-applied at the next possible completion.

This describes the normative patterns observed in natural conversational turn-taking across contexts in the first decade of CA research. As a finding it provides a framework for further exploratory work in CA, and a strong empirical basis for theory formation for experimentation. As a research outcome, this exemplifies how CA can produce detailed, systematic descriptions from cumulative observations.

Alongside these longer-term results, the CA research cycle involves structured observation throughout the process of data gathering, presentation, and collaborative analysis of data within the scope of a single study. Current best practice for CA data gathering involves video of an interactional situation from multiple angles where all participants’ gaze direction, gestures, body orientation, and talk are – ideally – available for analysis. Within relevant practical, social, and ethical constraints, it is useful to record whatever participants evidently pay attention to within the setting including objects, tools, documents, computer, phone, and screen captures. Interaction mediated via text, audio, and video also constitutes viable data, however for a sequential analysis, participants and CA researchers should be able to access the same evidential and temporal contingencies and constraints. For example, phone calls provide ideal data for CA studies because participants and researchers alike can analyse the same audio events in the same order. Because a CA study may focus on very intricate details, a few seconds of a recording can yield data for a ‘single case analysis’, contributing to or questioning cumulative findings. Researchers also re-analyse data from previous studies, use examples from audiovisual corpora and data fragments from the CA literature, often as a foil for discussion.

Transcription is central to CA research as it involves repeatedly reviewing the data to build up an initial description that can be checked by others from an early stage. Variations on Gail Jefferson’s transcription conventions1 provide a level of detail that can be adjusted for the specific phenomena in question. Verbal interaction is typed out turn-by-turn, then symbols are added and arranged spatially to indicate temporal and production features of talk. For example, extract 1 depicts Paul and Anne’s talk as their teacher sings a count of eight during a partner dance class. Links to online data are also provided where possible.

Reading while listening to the audio should show how Jefferson’s conventions are roughly intuitive : left and right braces show points of overlap, carats show talk speeding up, while colons indicate sound stretches. Because these conventions compromise between precision, detail, and readability there are also some inevitable ambiguities, for example punctuation indicates intonation rather than grammar, and turn-initial capitals mark transcriber hearings of turn-beginnings, but elsewhere they indicate loud talk. The purpose, however, is not analysis of the transcript. Rather transcripts provide a useful sketch to aid in more formal description, and a convenient way for analysts to refer to specific moments of the original video in a data session presentation.

In a data session, a researcher presents new data and transcripts for repeated viewings and extended analytical discussion amongst a small group of colleagues. Since CA relies on the linguistic and interactional aptitude of the analyst as an heuristic instrument, regular data sessions provide an essential opportunity to revise transcripts and candidate analyses amongst peers. Details of the present data are discussed in relation to cumulative findings, and the implications of or alternatives to each analysis are proposed and challenged. Ideally, data sessions are both pedagogical and deliberative, where experienced and student analysts refine their observations and descriptions by picking out specific fragments of data, and contextualise findings within the literature. Over time, researchers build ‘collections’ of data fragments such as extract 1: part of a collection of ‘countings’, where people count up or down to coordinate joint actions. A rough collection is a starting point for identifying a distinct social practice as a specifiable analytic phenomenon. Analysis then refines a collection in terms of how participants orient to the sequential organisation of an action, and to its lexical, grammatical, and/or embodied structural features of composition and design (Schegloff 1993, 121). For example, before the video clip of extract 1 starts, Paul and Anne have been evaluating their previous attempt at a dance move. The teacher’s count starts with a loud, stretched “”, a short pause then a rising “”, before both pitch and count re-sets to five and moves back up to a final, rising “”. At the onset of the count, Paul’s turns his head to the teachers and back to Anne, hushing his second “”. Anne also speeds up and softens her talk, turning her head towards the teachers then back to Paul as the count reaches its first “”. Paul’s minimal “” receipts Anne’s assessment just as he briefly turns his head away from her again. Her laugh closes the sequence, and they re-establish mutual gaze as the count enters its final phase.

Forgoing more detailed description on the one hand, and the broader sequential context on the other, this fragment provides a simple example of how such data can be presented. The embodied turn (Nevile 2015) in the CA literature has led researchers to add more detail to transcripts of talk, using illustrations (Laurier 2014) to describe gesture and gaze direction as well as diagrammatic representations of, for example pitch tracks and phonological details. Figure illustrates the temporal structure of talk and patterns of other-directed mutual gaze just before Paul and Anne start dancing.

Figure 1: Paul and Anne’s pattern of gaze orientation in extract 1

In terms of cumulative CA findings, these details could be analysed alongside generalised CA work on how assessments implicate sequence closure in everyday conversation, and how patterns of mutual gaze work towards topic, focus, and activity shifts (Heath 1986, 128–48; Mondada 2006; Rossano 2012, 227–308). In a more applied project, the way the dancers’ turns at talk and gaze shifts match the phase structure of the teacher’s count could be analysed in relation to ongoing research into how bodily-vocal group activities are organised in dance instruction (Keevallik 2014). This fragment may be added to multiple collections including ’embodied closings’ or ‘countings’ as well as specialised sub-collections such as ‘dance closings’ and ‘count-ins’. CA findings are thus developed incrementally by documenting the detail of people’s interactional practices in specific settings while contributing to a general understanding of ‘everyday talk-in-interaction’. This super-set of copresent interactional practices provides a normative basis for researchers studying specialised settings where institutional or practical constraints may constrain interactional practices (Drew and Heritage 1992) Identifying and fully describing a new phenomenon in these terms may therefore require collection of hundreds of cases, but a single case analysis can still test, discuss, or suggest a finding by demonstrating its use in a specific context.

CA can also be used in mixed-methods research, especially in theory formation, experimental design, and evaluation processes. CA researchers may discover a systematic variation in participants’ situated action, sometimes as simple as an issue of lexical choice. For example, Heritage et al. (2007) observed that doctors vary the ways they ask about patients’ unmet concerns during consultations. Their experiment asked doctors to request whether their patients had “anything else” or “something else” to talk about, and discovered that 78% fewer unmet concerns were reported in the latter condition. In this way CA’s focus on interactional practices in natural settings provides systematic observations that can help design ecologically sound experimental variables and guide the formulation of falsifiable theories (Robinson and Heritage 2014). In conjunction with more conventional social science methods, CA is useful in similar ways when it foregrounds the participants’ interactional uses of the research setting. For example, CA studies of interviewing practices (Potter and Hepburn 2012) contribute to methodological developments that are starting to incorporate the pragmatics of talk and the practicalities of survey technologies into a broader analysis (Conrad, Schober, and Schwarz 2013). Similarly, studies of methods that use introspective self-report (Wooffitt and Holt 2011) or CA’s own practices of video recording (Hazel 2015) are opening up new opportunities to approach theoretical questions across fields as practical, observable issues based on the endogenous organisation of situated activities. CA’s early focus on everyday talk has both influenced and drawn on the interactional respecification of core questions in linguistics and pragmatics (Ochs, Schegloff, and Thompson 1996; Levinson 1983), and psychology (Edwards and Potter 2001; Tileagă and Stokoe 2015), along with a broader shift in the social sciences towards posing empirical questions in terms of practical action (Button 1991; Lynch 1997). To use CA within a broader scientific context, however, it is necessary to clarify how its findings are descriptive of normative structures in talk rather than predictive or prescriptive, and may be combined with other methods in order to develop and test formal hypotheses (Lynch 2000, 522).

Edwards, Derek, and Jonathan Potter. 2001. “Discursive Social Psychology.” In The New Handbook of Language and Social Psychology, edited by P Robinson and H Giles, 103–18. London: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

If we want to evaluate aesthetic experiences beyond forms of value we already expect to find, we should look at what people actually do when they experience and discuss art together.

I gave this talk at the 2017 CAA annual conference in Sarah Cook and Charlotte Frost‘s ‘Accelerated art history: tools and techniques for a fast-changing art world’ session. The talk focused on the kinds of things that people say when they’re discussing art, and what we can learn from observing those conversations in order to choose and calibrate our methods of arts evaluation. The main point is that given the basic philosophical problems of using objective measures to evaluate ostensibly subjective experiences, we should use empirical methods such as conversation analysis which are designed for studying interaction and participation to guide the tools and approaches we take to evaluating specific aesthetic experiences and situations.

Stivers, T. (2008), Stance, alignment and affiliation during storytelling: when nodding is a token of affiliation Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41, 31-57

Abstract

Theorists struggle to describe, analyze, and document event-based artwork because its relevance and value seems inextricable from the many varied experiences that involve and therefore constitute the work.

Cultural studies tackles this problem by exploring the social uses of cultural literacy: how artworks may be constituted by a community of use or propagated as mass culture. Critical sociologists of art have shifted focus from the hagiography of artists and cultural canons to diffuse cultural production, distribution, and evaluation processes within specific groups and subcultures. But then which of the situations where cultural works are used and experienced is most relevant? Today, a 90s net.art piece may be viewed on a seat-back monitor in-flight, and early performance, ready-made, or conceptual artworks are often experienced via photographs, retellings in conversation, or as written into art histories. One solution is to treat all social uses of artworks as event-based and therefore analyzable. Recordings of everyday social settings where people engage with artworks in mundane and practical ways can reveal an artwork’s relevance and value in that specific situation. In this talk I plan to demonstrate three critical methodological approaches using three analytic vignettes: two young men shoot and narrate a YouTube video of a performance artwork; two builders discuss Jackson Pollock while plastering a wall; a gallerist and their client flip through an auction catalog. These micro-sociological events reveal the interactional uses of cultural literacy: how people themselves deal with an artwork’s many possible uses and can inform how we should best describe, analyze, and document event-based artwork.

Abstract

Assessment sequences where someone ostensibly expresses likes or dislikes are core CA phenomena, but do they actually constitute evaluative actions? Analyses of the preference organisation of agreements and disagreements with assessments inform CA studies of how participants index respective rights to do evaluations. However, the evaluative action is usually attributed to the use of prospective adjacent pairs of conventional ‘assessing terms’: a somewhat circular definition. This talk focuses on gallery visitors’ copresent assessments and structurally related sequences from a large corpus of everyday talk to show how such assessments are organised as reflexively accountable and only retroactively evaluative actions. Assessments, noticings, and other retro-sequential structures are therefore especially useful for doing (and analysing) ‘defeasible’ actions where participants work to remain equivocal about their current activities, participation roles, and interactional foci. CA studies of action formation and ascription have noted the difficulties of coding such actions into clear ‘types’. This presentation shows how participants themselves produce this obscurity as an interactional resource.

Notes

NB: Tino Sehgal requested that I did not reproduce any photos or video stills that I took from the piece. I therefore used an image of the Tate Modern Turbine Hall (in slide 10) by Groume. (2012, August). “Des gens qui regardent des gens.” Flickr.com; Online, accessed 15th September 2015. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/groume1 (licence: CC-BY)

Academic reading should feel like having a great discussion amongst colleagues. But your reading habits may be making it feel more like listening to a long, uninterrupted series of lectures. This post introduces some techniques (and links to some tools and technologies) that might help make your literature reviewing feel more convivial.

A literature review process can sometimes feel like a long slog through endless academic monologuing. By the time it comes to your turn to respond (in writing) it’s often really hard to remember all the moments where, if you’d been talking to the authors, you would have nodded to show that you’d taken note, or butted in to ask a question, launch a criticism, or where you had a new idea based on an insight and felt the thrill of chasing down an idea together. Experiencing these moments are the reason we actually read academic papers: as an extension of academic discussion. However, it can be hard to remember this as you sit, pen in hand, taking notes on all the thousands of papers that may cross your desk as you read your way into some branch of the literature for a PhD or research project.

Over the course of my PhD, I developed the following set of approaches for making time to read in any situation – from sitting in the bath to talking a walk – and for making ‘actionable’ notes – based on the impulses I would have felt, at any particular moment in the text, had I been talking to the authors in person. I made sure I could access these notes conveniently later on, and in many cases, I used them as a starting point for following up next time I actually interacted with that person. These habits began to turn my academic reading into what still feels like a really useful, ongoing conversation.

These are the methods that work for me, and some specific software/hardware tools (which I link to, but won’t go into individual detail). You will probably want to adapt these for your own tools/workflows. The main point is to establish a consistent routine that you enjoy, and that can help your reading feel more like a good conversation.

1. Treat your reading list as if you’re inviting the authors over for a discussion

If you were inviting people to have a discussion, you’d be really organized about it. You’d keep track of who you’d invited, and you’d know how many people were invited and why. Also, you’d probably invite people who you suspected would have interesting things to say to each other. Take this approach with your reading list.

Here’s how I keep my ‘invitations’ organized, and make sure they’re kept up to date.

I have three ‘literature’ folders (which I keep in my Dropbox): ‘readme’, ‘papers_to_check‘ and ‘literature_repository‘.

‘readme’ contains copies of a group of papers from my ‘literature_repository’ I want to read or re-read relating to some topic or (in sub-folders) a set of topics.

‘papers_to_check’ is for new papers I’ve downloaded. They need to be named and given bibliographical information before I invite them into my ‘readme’ folder.

‘literature_repository’ contains all my PDF papers and books, each of which has complete bibliographical reference info and (if I’ve read it) annotated notes.

Every week I add three recurring items on my todo list:

process papers_to_check: look up bibliographical references, rename the PDF files (AuthornameYYYY-title.pdf), place them in the literature_repository folder.

cue up new papers into readme: ‘invite’ anything that looks immediately relevant (or older things I might need to re-read) into the ‘readme’ folder.

update the literature_repository: move read papers from readme back into the literature_repository folder. This bit is like cleaning up after the guests leave.

This procedure means I’m less likely to lose my notes, that I’m methodical about adding bibliographical information, and that I always have something relevant to read.

2. Use different tools and approaches for different kinds of reading

Read like you interact: in different ways depending on the context – from highly intensive and productive work-meetings to chatting with a jogging-buddy.

I notice myself doing three kinds of reading: reading while writing, dedicated reading, and casual reading on the move. I use different tools for different situations.

While writing, which is typically when I’m most focused on what I’m reading and how I’m going to use it, I use PDF-XChange viewer (under wine when on Linux) to read and annotate PDFs. It’s proprietary freeware, but I really like this tool. I’m not going to go into how to make PDF annotations in technical detail (I’ll assume you know how to do that). But find a tool that makes standards compliant PDF annotations. Since I’m at my desk, I’ll pull PDFs straight from my literature_repository (unless they’re already cued up in my readme folder), and I’ll make and use my annotations almost immediately.

While focusing (sitting down, reading with intent) I use EZpdf reader on a 2013 Nexus 7 android tablet which I bought for $100. I use Dropsync on my tablet to synchronize my readme folder with my Dropbox. I also use Swiftkey to speed up the annotation process using smart auto-completion algorithms that learn my often-used words and phrases. Although presumably most portable operating systems have good PDF annotation tools, I’ve found my setup to be a very good compromise of portability, price and reading comfort. When I add a paper to my readme folder, it gets synchronized with my tablet, when I update annotations on the tablet, they’re synchronized with my readme Dropbox folder. This post isn’t really intended as a technical how-to, but if anyone is interested, I can post a walk-through video of the set-up and usage process of my specific set-up that highlights some of the quirks of working with with EZpdf reader – and the workarounds I’ve found for them. If you’re interested – just ask!

While on the move, or while reading casually (maybe a first pass of a paper I’m not sure is really relevant yet), I don’t actually read in a focused way. Instead, I get my tablet to read to me using EZpdf reader’s text-to-speech function and IVONA voices, which really sound remarkably good compared to the default voices included with Apple IOS or Android. While it reads, if I hear something I am interested in, I can make an annotation as it continues reading, then return to that annotation later. If I eventually decide to read this paper in a more focused way, or while writing, I have an actionable ‘hook’ from my first reading to return to.

What do I mean by ‘actionable’? That’s really the most important point to make about reading and taking useful notes:

3. Use action-oriented labels and project-oriented tags

One of the most important things anyone who facilitates useful meetings (and good communication in general) will tell you is to clarify action points and agendas.

When you take a note on a paper, write what it was you wanted to do when taking the note, and what project it related to. I have several action-oriented labels:

todo: The most important label – this reminds me to do something (look up a paper, change something in my manuscript etc.)

idea: I’m inspired with a new idea, somehow based on this paper, but it’s my own thing.

ref: This is a reference, or contains a reference that I want to use for something.

question: or just q: I have a question about this, maybe to ask the author or myself in relation to my data / research.

quote: I want to quote this, or it contains a useful quote

note: Not a specific use in mind for this, but it’s worth remembering next time I pick up this paper.

term: A new term or word I’m not familiar with: I look it up or define it in the annotation.

crit: I have a criticism of this bit of the paper.

I also use project-oriented hashtags for each research project/idea I’m currently working on. So if I’m reading a paper and it says something like:

“Something I want to criticize and respond to in my next article on some topic”

I’ll highlight that bit of the text, copy and paste the text itself that into a PDF annotation, and add a few keywords on the top:

quote: “Something I really disagree with and want to comment on or respond to in my next article on some topic” #sometopic #someothertopic

Or this might spark the idea that I could collect other papers with this same opinion, so I’ll write myself a todo item:

todo: look up other papers that agree with: “Something I really disagree with and want to comment on or respond to in my next article on some topic” #sometopic

This means when I search for my annotations I can extract all the ones to do with #sometopic or #someothertopic projects, I’ll find this one, and I’ll know I wanted to use this as a quote when writing, and that I should add something to my todo list for when I next go to the library or do a literature search.

One of the major logistical problems facing researchers who use large audiovisual data files featuring recordings of human subjects is how to share it with colleagues simply, securely and inexpensively.

By simple, I mean that the a/v file-sharing solution should not need specialized equipment or an expert systems administrator to set it up for you. Most universities and research institutions have in-house research file servers. These may be security audited, up-to-date and well-organized – they may seem unlikely to suddenly lose or delete all your data or randomly restrict access to your colleagues in other institutions. However, in my experience, it’s best to manage your own data and backups!

By secure I mean that it should not rely on cloud-hosted storage (which may store and transfer data anywhere in the world), or allow data to be transferred unencrypted between remote systems. This is often a requirement of UK human subjects/ethical approval – so it’s particularly relevant in the case of UK educational institutions, but this is probably also true elsewhere.

By inexpensive I mean that it should not cost the end-user an ongoing fee, or meter use per gigabyte stored. Commercially available cloud file-storage services like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive or iCloud are relatively cheap up to ~ 1TB storage, they can get quite expensive beyond that, and if you have multiple projects with multiple researchers in different groups sharing data – the total cost for all researchers can become prohibitive.

There are trade-offs between these three requirements – this blog post outlines how to use Syncthing – which I think is an optimal solution – to solve this issue.

What is Syncthing?

Syncthing is a file synchronization tool – much like Dropbox, but it is peer-to-peer, which means it works like Bittorrent or other file sharing tools that do not require a central server-based system to share files.

A client-server model (left) and a peer-to-peer system (right).

Why use Syncthing?

Firstly, Syncthing is an open source, peer-to-peer file sharing system, which means it is relatively cheap, simple to set up and secure. It is especially good for sharing very large files and collections of files without having to pay or to trust an intermediary to maintain a centralized file server. You run Syncthing on your computer, the person you want to share files with runs it on theirs, and you can set up folders that will synchronize files automatically when both your computers are turned on and connected to the internet. The data is encrypted in transit, and never sits on someone else’s server. Syncthing only requires each user to have a normal computer or laptop, rather than running on a server with each person using a ‘client’. This is more secure, and probably less complex to set up and maintain.

Secondly, Syncthing is open source, under active development and compatible with all major computing platforms because inevitably people will use Mac OSX and Windows, and sometimes *nix. Syncthing is one of many open source tools relevant for educational contexts, which are not only cheaper for individual researchers and teams, but also tend to stick around for longer.

Finally, Syncthing allows each user to choose how they want to organisze their folder structure. Whereas Dropbox uses a standard ‘dropbox’ folder, and (by default, at least) forces everyone use the same folder structure and folder names for their files, Syncthing allows you to put your data wherever you want on your hard drive, but still choose it as a folder to synchronize with your colleagues. So I may choose to put my video file in a folder on my Linux machine here:

/home/saul/data/project1/video1/video1.m4v

while you might have your videos on your windows machine at

C:\Users\Yourname\projects\project1\videos\video1.m4v

A third colleague may store video on their desktop (tut tut) on their Mac at:

/Users/user/Desktop/video files/video1.m4v

We can all then use Syncthing and choose to synchronize my ‘/video1/video1’ folder with your ‘\project1\videos’ folder and our colleague can synchronize with their desktop ‘video files’ folder – so despite us all having different data naming schema, we can collaborate effectively, share files, and keep our own file systems organized in a flexible and personalized way.

For many years I’ve used Dropbox but I’m always running out of space, then having to weed out awkwardly placed or duplicated files from collaborative projects which may or may not still be used or needed by collaborators. So this feature of Syncthing is a huge selling point for me.

What is Syncthing not so good for?

Syncthing is not particularly good for synchronizing millions of small, regularly updated files. Syncthing monitors which files need syncing by scanning its folders every few seconds to find out what has been updated – this can be a bit processor intensive if you have hundreds of thousands of files to scan through. So, it’s best to use it for projects with a few thousand large (especially video/heavy data) files rather than projects with tens of thousands or millions of files. For the same reason, if you need the files to remain synchronized in (close to) real-time, Syncthing’s folder scanning process will probably take too long.

Syncthing is not great for always-online files. Because it is a peer-to-peer system, Syncthing requires the computers you are keeping in sync to be online at the same time for syncrhonization to take place. Dropbox, by contrast, uses an always-online server, so it doesn’t matter if your multiple computers running Dropbox are online at the same time or not – the server will make sure they all have the most recent version of your Dropbox files. So, if you need something always-online, better to use a server-client system like Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud etc.

Syncthing is not particularly useful on smartphones/tablets. Finally, although Syncthing does have an Android client and an iOS client, these are not officially supported by the same developers who work on syncthing, nor are they going to work if your computer is off-line when you need to grab a file via your mobile syncthing client.

Installing Syncthing

Syncthing has excellent, up-to-date documentation that will guide you through the installation process. However, there are also several helpful videos that will help you install Syncthing on different operating systems. I couldn’t find a video about how to install Syncthing on Mac OSX, so I made one myself.

Installing Syncthing on Windows

Installing Syncthing on Linux

Setting up and using Syncthing to share data

If you want to learn how to set up Syncthing for special purposes, and you want to explore all the options, I recommend reading the documentation, and if you want an in-depth video guide, I recommend the Nerd on the Street guide to setting up Syncthing. However, for a quick-start video, once you’ve installed it, I’ve created a short video that shows you how to use Syncthing to keep a folder in sync between two computers with the simplest set of default options.

I’ve used Mac OSX (el capitain) in this video, because I think it’s actually harder for most OSX users to understand how to fill in the Folder Path options (the location of the folder you want to sync) when setting up Syncthing for the first time. It’s relatively straight-forward to find Folder Paths in Windows and if you’re using Linux, I expect you’ll already know how to do that.

Another major issue I had to deal with was cross-platform file-naming issues (especially for Mac OSX users). Basically, different file systems (FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, UFS/+, ext2/3 etc. etc.) allow different kinds of file names. If you are synchronizing folders between different file systems (on external drives, system hard drives, different operating systems etc.) it makes sense to use very conservative conventions.

I recommend the following:

Do not use special characters, apostrophes, colons etc. in your file names.

Use short, informative file naming conventions – include dates, project names etc. but do not use colons for times (like HH:MM:SS) as this will not work on many popular file systems.

Alternatives to Syncthing

There are many alternatives – some of them look very interesting, but none of them fit all the requirements outlined above as well as Syncthing. I’m open to adding to this list – so if you have a solution that isn’t shown here, please do let me know.

Finally – a very good solution, with minimum fuss or technology is to just copy your files onto small external hard drives and snail-mail them to each other in well-padded mailing boxes. That’s often a simpler (if slower) solution than setting up one of these systems!

I just ran a 2 hour workshop for the Media and Arts Technology Doctoral Training Centre using a variant of the Spectroscope Facilitation method during which 10 people showed and discussed their researcher / artist / technologist portfolio websites and gave each other structured feedback. After the show & tell session, each of the participants went home with 27 prioritised ‘todo’ advisory notes written by other participants to improve their own websites. However, one of the most useful outcomes – that I’m going to share here – was a set of 10 best-practice tips derived from each participant writing down what they really liked about each other’s sites.

These are neither comprehensive, nor all compatible with one another – and I certainly could take much of this advice to improve my own website, but anyone thinking of setting up and academic / personal / portfolio site might find these useful. The most important question for anyone to address with their website was to ask who and what is the website for. Is it a CV to convince potential employers in academia, or to appeal to ad agencies, or to attract artistic commissions? Once these central questions were answered, the following tips could be used to improve each site.

Prioritise clarity and coherence.

Make a clear statement of who you are and what you do in plain language – right up front.

What is the website for? If it’s basically a CV, use the word ‘CV’. If it’s a portfolio, use the word ‘portfolio’. Shape the expectations of the visitor so they know what they’re getting.

Add this information to the title/metadata the homepage, so the title bar (and Google’s web crawlers) read e.g. “Name, Job description, Purpose of site”.

If you have a lot of projects to show, put a selection of only the best/most targeted to the purpose of the site on the front page.

Foreground your main activity/role.

If you have multiple quite different audiences/purposes in mind for your site, consider making multiple sites.

However, it can also be useful to show multiple facets of what you do – if one is a minor activity and the other a major activity, combine and show a richer combined picture.

Keep it current.

Make sure you can update it easily, reduce friction by choosing technology that you enjoy using.

Show what’s upcoming – tell people what you’re doing next.

Avoid showing out of date information by e.g. not using temporally-relative wording ‘this year’ etc.

Show as many of your menu items as you can all at once – don’t hide menus behind fancy dropdowns or multiple click-throughs.

Optimise for ‘fewer clicks’. Try to make everything on the site only one or maximum two clicks away. The most important things must be one click away and immediately visible on the homepage.

Get a domain name.

Buy your own domain name. It costs almost nothing and it mostly looks more professional.

It’s also more future-proof, i.e. if you buy www.myname.com and point it to a wordpress site, or a squarespace site, or a cargocollective site, but then change where you host the site, you can take the domain with you. If you relied on wordpress.com/myname – you’re stuck with wordpress.

If you can, use short urls e.g. http://myname.com/about or http://myname.com/project/myproject – this is relatively portable (as above) so you can change which software you use to produce your website without being tied to software-specific page names and urls.

It’s good to have your own domain for email (especially if you’re a freelancer – less an issue in academia where people use institutional emails). However, be careful not to use vanity emails like info@myname.com to sign up for core services. Here’s why.

If you are an artist with lots of great visual work – which unscrupulous people love to use without permission – say how you want people to use it.

If you want people to spread your work and give you credit, use a license such as the CC-BY – or use the CC0 option if you want to put your work in the Public Domain.

Offer alternatives to audiovisual content.

A few images work as well as a video, sometimes better.

Consider using a simple explanatory animated GIF so people don’t have to download a whole video. 1

Always consider people with low bandwidth, small screens, out of date browsers. Responsive designs are easy these days with lots of great templates available for most website/blogging engines or just HTML5 templates.

Enhance your ‘findability’.

Add a list of hardware / software / techniques / approaches used for each project. This shows what you can do, and it helps people using Google to find you and what you know about.

In general think of your site as a dragnet for people to find you. It’s much better to be found than to go knocking on people’s doors – so think about who do you want to find you.

Use analytics – you should know how people see your site, where from, and which pages they visit – it helps you make decisions about how to change and update it.

It’s amazingly important to care about your web presence these days – make it reflect who you are, what you care about and believe, and make it unique. Of course this also means being critical, self-aware and careful not to project those bits of yourself that might undermine the purpose of your site!

Sometimes a web 1.0 site at an address like http://institutionalname.edu/~yourname is a good way to show who you are – if you’re an academic in engineering or computer science. Go with that, engineering academics who are looking to hire you will recognise you as one of their own.

A really beautiful, unique and intriguing image of your work – or a great video or poem can be a wonderful hook into an art or design-focused site. Intrigue people, then reward them with more eye candy and carefully thought through information.

Show your network – link to others, make sure to credit all collaborators and link to them, they’ll appreciate it!

These are somewhat general tips. There was also a lot more technical advice in our email thread about this workshop, as well as some advice on which website services might be useful. Some of those links are included below – but any further explanation as to what to do with them is well beyond the scope of this post!

Beginners:

WordPress – either as a hosted service – or self-hosted on your own server. If self-hosted, beware! It can be tricky to maintain and has had lots of security problems in the past.

Travis Noakes suggests (see the comments section below), using a unifying visual metaphor that brings together your website, your visual presentations and even the binding of your thesis. Travis’ excellent research blog uses the “+” sign to do this and is well worth checking out as a great example of a researcher’s site that integrates his description of his roles and foci with the site’s navigation and visual communication. He also suggests using Google’s Blogger platform for enhanced google juice and ease of use.

A good tip on this from Victor Loux: If you’re considering using a GIF to show a specific interaction in a project, also consider that GIFs can be several megabytes big if they’re wide, as well as being lower quality (limited to 256 colours and less fluid). The trick I’ve used for my website (the ‘PeDeTe’ project) is to actually use a <video> element that acts like a gif (autoplay, looped, and no sound); for the same video length and same resolution, it reduced a 4.8 Mb (!) GIF to a 395 kb mp4 file. Most modern browsers support it and you can certainly find/make a polyfill for older ones. The only downside is that iOS will refuse to autoplay it, unlike GIFs, so that’s just not a viable option if mobile is really important. ↩

What can audience members’ embodied, rhythmical movements tell us about their experience of a musical dance performance? And what do their responses reveal about the composition, organisation and production of the performance itself?

This important distinction – which if you think about it, is very difficult to describe in theory – can be made in practice by tracking how participants deal with moments where the rhythmical coordination of (in this case) the audience’s clapping, the musical structure and the dancers’ joint movements seems likely to break down.

The systematic ways participants in this situation manage disruptions to the audience’s rhythmical clapping in relation to the dancers’ movements shows how they all work to uphold the relevance of normative patterns of mutual coordination. That’s a fancy way of saying that what is considered ‘good’ in this particular partner dance is not some fixed model of perfect dance movement, but the threat (and eventual narrow avoidance) of screwing up. This kind of analysis reveals how dancers initiate, sustain and complete distinct phases of spontaneous movement as embodied social actions.

The analysis in the paper uses detailed, empirical examples of rhythmical coordination to show how dancers and audience members combine improvisation and set-piece choreography. Here’s an example from the conclusion that shows just a few of the rhythmical patterns we can derive from a detailed analysis of just 10 seconds of dancing.

The audience’s clapping mapped to the clapping of a specific member of the audience (Jo Hoffberg!) and the footfalls of each dancer.

This kind of analysis may not tell us much about the qualitative detail of the dance. However, it provides a clear empirical resource for further analytical work – which can then be analysed in relation to more everyday forms of rhythmical coordination. This provides a starting point for analysing the dancers’ activities and the audience’s response in a way that draws on empirically observable materials that also focuses on the methods the participants themselves use to make sense of those materials.

The approach proposed by this paper shows how people use whatever materials are available including visible, audible and tactile bodily actions as part of a communicative environment. It shows how they can combine these resources in an ad-hoc fashion to coordinate and communicate their movements – much as we do in everyday talk in interaction.

For example, here’s a diagram that shows some of the empirical distinctions we can make about rhythmical coordination in various everyday activities.

Based on this kind of analysis, the paper maps out all the available rhythms in that particular 10 second clip – and shows how they are organised in clearly distinctive patterns.

Coupled and uncoupled forms of rhythmical coordination in the 10 seconds of dancing in Michael and Frida’s Jack and Jill.

The purpose, and overall take-away from this paper is that when people talk about the ‘language of dance’, it’s not just an empty idiom, or a transposition of linguistic/semiotic theories onto bodily movements. Dance, seen in its broader social and interactional context, and especially in vernacular dance practices actually functions much like language. In fact, it may be quite difficult to draw clear empirical distinctions between dance, sign language and other forms of communicative social action.

Of course this paper doesn’t go that far – it is intended to set a course for future work as part of a larger project on partner dance as an interactional practice. It suggests that a good place to start understanding the ‘language of dance’ is to look at vernacular practices – where improvisation is combined with set-piece choreography through ad-hoc embodied social action. In particular, the paper suggests that rhythm is one way we can begin to look at dance – and other socio-aesthetic practices – as everyday interactional achievements.

take notes while reading that won’t get lost or damaged by your software,

organise notes and annotations so you won’t forget why you took them,

In this section, you will learn how to:

maintain associated bibliographical records,

use Docear in a way that will keep your literature reviewing current for years to come.

Warning: long post, so here’s a table of contents:

First, Import your annotations into Docear to manage them

So far, this guide has given you some pretty generic advice about note taking, you could use it in any piece of software. The Docear-specific pay-off for this process comes when you import your PDFs into Docear: you can use Docear’s internal scripting language (well, FreePlane’s version of Groovy) to format, re-organise and label your new annotations automatically. I have some complicated scripts that I won’t cover here, but here’s a very simple one I use to automatically apply visual labels to my annotations.

Docear offers a number of visual labels you can use to decorate the nodes in your maps, to make them visually appealing and easily distinguishable:

I have written a script that looks for all annotations beginning with ‘idea’, or ‘ref’ or ‘term’, and allocates them one of a number of pre-set visual labels provided by Docear.

To install this script, I wrote this code to a file called addiconNodes.groovy, which I then put it in my /home/saul/.docear/scripts directory (NB: the location of this directory may vary on Mac/Win). Docear also has a built-in script editor you can use to write groovy scripts. The script then becomes available as a contextual menu item.

Here are some illustrations showing the script being run on a newly imported paper:

Selecting the script option in Docear:

What it looks like when the script has run finished:

And how you might then choose to organise your annotations:

You’ll find lots of Freeplane scripts you can modify and play with here – there are some amazing possibilities – the icons script above doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what this method could do for your literature reviewing process.

Using Docear to manage thousands of papers across multiple projects and multiple years

Docear’s demo shows someone writing a paper with about 20 or 30 references. This is fine for one project, but I have over 3000 PDF books and papers in my literature repository. Over the years, I suspect this will continue to grow. I want to feel secure that my library of research papers, annotations and references is in one safe location on my hard drive. I also don’t want to have to duplicate those PDFs each time I start a new project. Here are some of my solutions to these issues geared towards a long-term research strategy.

First: a geeky caveat

Having recommended Docear for the approach outlined so far, there are some problems with Docear that I think you will have to address if you are really going to use it for a long-term research and literature management strategy.

If you think you might just use it for a masters-level one year project, the rest of this guide probably isn’t necessary. If you want to read your way into and stay up to date with the vast literature of one or more academic fields long-term, read on, but be warned: it gets even more geeky from here on in.

Docear’s default per-project folder structure and its problems

At the moment Docear encourages you to store your PDFs on a per-project basis, as if you were starting from literature year 0 each time you write something. Also (by default, at least) it puts them in a rather obscure folder structure. I don’t really trust myself to reliably back-up obscure folder structures.

Here’s how Docear does a default file structure for a demo project I just created

The idea from Docear’s developers here is that you get a few files by default when you start a new project including a dummy ‘My New Paper.mm’ (.mm stands for Mind Map) , a project-name.bib file and a literature_and_annotations.mm file, and a folder to hold all the PDFs you’ve associated with this project..

The literature_and_annotations.mm file contains a script that – when you open it – will scan through this project-specific literature_repository and check for updated files or new annotations.

This creates several problems:

Docear’s structure works fine for a per-project use, but I have 9GB of PDFs, I do not want to wait for Docear to scan through those and check for updates every time I start it up.

I’d rather not store all my precious PDFs with thousands of hours-worth of annotations 5 levels down an application-specific folder hierarchy that I may or may not remember to transfer to a new machine. Similarly, I don’t want my references – which may have taken a long time to assemble stored in a folder handily called ‘1493C9745013F2UNMIV1XCU93LBPZ4Y0KU14’.

I want to be able to use PDFs and bibliographic data from all my previous projects in new projects easily.

Work-around 1: consolidating your literature archive

Use a ‘main_literature_repository’ for your key files

I create a ‘default’ project into which I first import for all my PDFs and references

I set up this project to store PDFs in a folder in my Dropbox called main_literature_repository.

I put the main BibTeX file for this project in the same folder.

This means I have one canonical BibTeX file with all the books and papers I will ever import in my main_literature_repository folder – this makes it easy to back up. I use Dropbox to keep rough versioning for me in case I do something silly or lose my machine/s – use your backup strategy and folder location of choice.

Use a per-paper mind map for long-term annotation and re-annotation

I delete the literature_and_annotations.mm file from my default project. I do not want to wait 3 hours while Docear scans through all 9GB of my papers when it starts up. Instead, in the same main_literature_repository folder, I create a per-paper mind map.

I do this because I may use a paper six times in six different paper/research contexts. Ideally, I want to be able to read and re-read it, and keep track of what interested me about it and when… not have to delve into each project I used it for.

So, once I’ve done my annotations, I create a new map in my default project, I import the PDF, copy and paste the title of the PDF and use it to name the new mind map identically to the paper, so that in my main_literature_repository folder I have:

Apart from anything else, I can glance through the folder listed alphabetically and see which papers I have actually read! Now every time I update my annotations in that paper, I can import them into this paper-specific map, and organise them.

I might want to do this in a number of ways (one big list, thematically etc.) but I usually organise them to show how they relate to the project I’m currently working on. If I read that paper three or four times, and each time I organise the new annotations in this way, after six or seven readings/uses of that paper it’s going to be interesting to be able to see how my use of this paper has changed over time.

A quick example of importing a paper:

I download a paper helpfully entitled: ‘12312131231512312313.pdf’ from a publisher. I re-name it something useful (e.g.:AuthornameYYYY-title.pdf)2, and put it into my main_literature_repository folder, using Docear or Jabref to add or automatically import its bibliographical record into my default project BibTeX file. Once I’ve read it and taken notes in annotations, I manually create a new map just for this paper in the same main_literature_repository folder. This is now the mother lode folder with all my really important work in it.

Work-around 2: using your papers across multiple projects

This bit is kind of tricky and involves many trade-offs, I think Docear will fix it some day, for now, this is how I am doing it.

I create a new project, and treat it as a ‘sub-project’ of my default project

When I start a new Docear project, I let Docear create a default folder structure something like the one above. To get literature from my main_literature_repository folder into this new project, I create symbolic file system links to the relevant PDF files in my main_literature_repository in the new sub-project-specific literature_repository folder.

Now if I open my literature_and_annotations.mm file in the new sub-project, it will import these new PDFs and their associated annotations and I can start working with them. Of course any changes to annotations I make in these maps will also change annotations in the original PDFs.

The only issue with this approach so far is that your new project-specific BibTeX file will not automatically import metadata from your ‘default’ project. This means that when you import your PDFs into this new project’s literature_and_annotations.mm map, they will have no bibliographical reference data attached.

To understand why – and how to solve it – you need to know a little bit more about how Docear works:

Docear allows you to re-organise your annotations while maintaining their associations with the bibliographical reference of the paper they’re drawn from by linking nodes in your Mind Map (.mm) files to PDFs referenced in your BibTeX file. Docear does this by adding a ‘file’ BibTeX field entry for each paper. Here’s an example of a BibTeX entry from my databse:

So when Docear scans this PDF, it extracts its annotations, places them in the map, and creates a hyperlink to the PDF listed the file field. This means if I click on the node, it opens the file. Docear also extracts the bibliographical information from this BibTeX reference, and then adds them as attributes of the associated annotation node on my map.

So, when I create a symbolic link to this file in my new sub-project, Docear sees it as a new PDF, namely:

But it doesn’t have any BibTeX data in this new project, so it won’t recognise this PDF and paste in associated bibliographical data.

To solve this issue, there are several possible solutions:

Sym link your ‘default project’ BibTeX file into each new sub-project using a symlink – just like you do with your PDF files.

Duplicate your ‘default project’ BibTeX file into each new sub-project, search/replacing the ‘file’ field of each entry to point to your new sub-project’s literature_repository folder.

Or, (and this is what I do), open your main BibTeX file in a recent, stand-alone version of JabRef and use the ‘write XMP data’ option to make sure that the PDFs themselves contain their own reference data. When you import these PDFs, you can then use the reference embedded in the PDF itself to create a new and separate project-specific BiBteX file.

JabRef’s XMP writing option:

This third option is preferable to me for several reasons:

I don’t want to see all my references in every new project – it’s distracting.

XMP data can be read by lots of other bits of software so it makes my reference library somewhat more portable. Also, if I lose my BibTeX file in some catastrophic data loss episode, as long as I have my PDFs with XMP bibliographic data I can pretty much reconstruct my literature, annotation and reference archive from just those files.

I may want to update my bibliographical records for a new project, but keep the references of older projects intact. Although I’m aware that I improve my bibliographies continually and incrementally, I really want to control how I change them. For example, if I continually use my default project BibTeX file, symlinked in to each new sub-project as in option 1, I may not be able to re-generate a paper I wrote three years ago before I made those changes and improvements. I really want that paper to be re-created exactly as it was when I wrote it, including all the reference details and errors. I can always update an old BibTeX file from an old project easily – because the PDF file itself now contains the latest up-to-date XMP data.

I see this feature of the latest, stand-alone version of JabRef (not available in Docear’s embedded version of JabRef) as a significant plus in terms of the sustainability of this approach to literature management.

Things I didn’t cover but may post about in the future

There are lots of other things you can do using this approach to Docear – and Docear’s approach in general, a few I can think of that I didn’t cover are:

Using the command line to search/filter your annotations.

Using recoll, spotlight or similar configurable full text search systems on your repository.

Importing folder structures containing other research materials into your map.

Using Docear (or freeplane) to take detailed and well structured notes during lectures.

Using Docear to manage and search Jeffersonian transcripts of conversational data.

If you have any questions or would like to hear about these, drop me an email or get me on @saul

Notes

^ Because I like small tools for simple jobs, I actually do this using JabRef in stand-alone mode, along with JabRef’s rename files plugin to do this automatically and configurably. NB: Docear will do this automatically in upcoming versions – the feature is already in there, just not quite ready yet.

This is part I of a two-part post in which I will walk you through some key parts of a technically-savvy user’s long-term literature review and maintenance strategy. In part I you will learn how to use Docear to:

take notes while reading that won’t get lost or damaged by your software,

organise notes and annotations so you won’t forget why you took them,

In part II, should you choose to get geeky and read that bit too, you will learn to:

maintain associated bibliographical records,

use Docear in a way that will keep your literature reviewing current for years to come.

Warning: long post, so here’s a table of contents:

Introduction

What this guide is for

There are many software systems that purport to be helpful in managing academic literature, and everyone swears by their own. My belief about software is that it’s usually a nightmare, and your choice should be driven by considerations of damage limitation. With that in mind, I am using Docear to limit the damage that software can do to my literature reviewing and thesis preparation process.

If you’re starting a PhD or a research process, and thinking about how to keep up with the literature long-term, you might want to think about using Docear in the ways described here. To get started with that, first download and install Docear, read Docear’s own very good user guide to understand the basics, then come back and read this1.

It’s Open Source software using well adopted, documented and supported file formats.

Docear’s plain text-based file formats for are searchable and editable.

Text-based files enable version control and collaboration (including with your future self).

Docear, JabRef and FreePlane all work together or separably on most platforms.

In general, Docear conforms with the tenets of Unix Philosophy i.e.: Docear is designed to be modular, clear, simple, transparent, robust, and extensible for users and developers.

What all this means for academics is that

You are probably always going to be able to edit and view these files on any platform.

If you just want to change a bibliographic reference, you can just use the bibliography manager (or a text editor) to do it on any computing platform without even firing up Docear.

If you just want to view your Docear file on Android, i0S, or using any mind-map viewer, you can open it (albeit with limited features) in FreePlane, FreeMind, Xmind or the many associated pieces of software that can read these files.

If you want to search your entire archive of papers, you can do it using grep on a command line or with any text-search and indexing system that can read your file system (I use Recoll).

It doesn’t mess with your files or do complex or potentially destructive things, use fancy databases etc. You can move away from Docear at any time – you’ll still have your annotations, your PDFs, your BibTeX reference files.

Mix these up, copy and paste annotations multiple times, make further notes on annotations etc.

Import file/folder structures from your hard disk, so you can get an overview of your data, files and research materials alongside your literature, and make notes and connections between them.

Maintain the bibliographical associations of your annotations and notes, even after copy/pasting/reorganising them.

Just to re-state this: I’m not going to go through these basics in this how-to, so if you want to learn to use Docear from scratch you really should read the manual. What follows are some adaptations I’ve made to the Docear workflow that I think make it even more useful as a secure and long-term bet for research literature management.

How to take notes that won’t get lost or corrupted

PDFs, however flawed as a document format, are a de facto standard in academia and aren’t going away soon. You can read, edit and share them relatively easily on all devices and platforms, so that’s probably how you should store your annotations and bibliographical data.

General annotation strategy

Many pieces of literature review / bibliography management / annotation software keep notes and bibliographical records scattered about in proprietary databases or separate annotation files, so following Docear’s excellent advice on the issue I use ezPDF Reader on Android, and PDF-XChange Viewer on Linux (via wine) to make my annotations in my PDFs themselves.

Docear allows you to manage these annotations effectively without sacrificing the simplicity and security of having it all in one, cross-platform, easily accessible file.

Synchronisation and backup across clients/computers

The benefits of this are clear: you can easily back up your PDFs.

I use Dropsync to synchronise my main_literature_repository folder with a folder on my Android tablet, so when I’m on the go I can take notes and have them appear automatically in my literature review mind map when I start up Docear.

I tried using Dropbox’s own android client, I found that it would sync too frequently, and sometimes randomly deletes its temporary files. For this reason I recommend syncing your entire PDF repository to your mobile devices, editing the PDF locally (on the android device’s file system), then synchronising with Dropbox or whatever local/cloud/repo/backup service you prefer.

How to remember why you took your notes in the first place

Use action-related tags for each annotation

I have most of my research ideas while reading, but they’re not all just ‘notes’, they are really different in response to different ideas about what I plan to do with that idea. So I find it useful to distinguish between the kinds of notes I take on documents. When I take an annotation, I track that difference by starting the annotation with one of 10 or so labels:

todo: The most important label – this reminds me to do something (look up a paper, change something in my manuscript etc.)

idea: I’m inspired with a new idea, somehow based on this paper, but it’s my own thing.

ref: This is a reference, or contains a reference that I want to use for something.

question: or just q: I have a question about this, maybe to ask the author or myself in relation to my data / research.

quote: I want to quote this, or it contains a useful quote

note: Not a specific use in mind for this, but it’s worth remembering next time I pick up this paper.

term: A new term or word I’m not familiar with: I look it up or define it in the annotation.

crit: I have a criticism of this bit of the paper.

There are a few others I use occasionally, but these are the most common. You probably can think of your own based on how you would categorise the kinds of thoughts that come to you while reading research papers.

Use keywords for each research project/idea

I have 3 or 4 project constantly on the go, and lots of ideas for new projects and papers. I want to capture my responses to what I’m reading in relation to those projects in a reliable way.

So, I have short, unique keywords for each of my projects:

camedia: a CA project about how people talk about the recording devices they’re using

cadance: a CA project about partner dance

thesis: my thesis

thesis_noticings: my chapter on noticings

thesis_introduction: get it?

So if I’m reading a paper and it says something like:

“Something I really disagree with and want to comment on or respond to in my next article on dance”

I’ll highlight, copy and paste that into a new annotation, and add a few keywords on the top:

quote: cadance: "Something I really disagree with and want to comment on or respond to in my next article on dance"

This means when I search for all my annotations to do with ‘cadance’ project, I’ll find this one, and I’ll know I wanted to use this as a quote.

Similarly, I may have multiple projects:

quote: cadance: thesis_noticings: "Something I really disagree with and want to comment on or respond to in my next article on dance"

If I want to quote something, but also want to write a note about it, I’ll make two separate annotations on the PDF, one that says:

quote: cadance: thesis_noticings: "Something I really disagree with and want to comment on or respond to in my next article on dance"

The other that says:

note: cadance: thesis_noticings: "Something I really disagree with and want to comment on or respond to in my next article on dance": I really disagree with this for reason, reason and reason.

These will show up in my literature review map as two separate annotations, with different actions attached to them.

Use auto-completion software to make this less painful

I use Switfkey for all my annotation on my Android tablet (where I do most of it). This greatly reduces the time required to type in repetitive tags or keywords that I use all the time to enhance my annotations (see the next section). It also offers auto-complete suggestions so I can remember more complex project keywords / tags easily.

That’s the general advice bit. Geeky advice follows in part II.

So far, this guide has given you some pretty generic advice about note taking, you could use it in any piece of software. The Docear-specific pay-off for this process comes when you import your PDFs into Docear. However, that bit gets pretty geeky. You’ll need to be comfortable with scripting, modifying workflows of existing software packages, and generally be unperturbed by geeky terminology.

If this isn’t your thing, you can just use Docear with the above strategies – or use them more generally in your literature reviewing.